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Ninety million years ago, during the Cretaceous Period, the Farallon Plate was subducting under the western coast of North America. This threw up the great volcanic edifices of the Sierra Nevada, whose weight flexed the North American Plate downwards. This created a great waterway, the Western Interior Seaway, that stretched...Read more

I visited the Latir volcanic field almost five years ago and saw some pretty interesting stuff. But there is a lot to that area, and I really only scratched the surface. So today I decided to visit the area again. So after breakfast and packing gear, I headed from White...Read more

This isn’t a wanderlust post per se. I spent yesterday catching up chores, so that I could do a wanderlust tomorrow (Labor Day) with a clear conscience. Hopefully my next post will be the usual photo-laden account of a geologic adventure. But sometimes I stumble across some facet of geology...Read more

Today’s hike has been a long time coming. I visited the area almost two years ago, but it was enough of a last-minute thing that I discovered at the trail head that I had failed to bring a working camera. I knew I wanted to go back and get the...Read more

We’ve had a good monsoon season. It hasn’t quite eliminated drought conditions in the state — we had a lackluster monsoon last summer, followed by a dreadful winter and spring — but even the pessimists in the local press admit that we’re in much better shape. The down side is...Read more

New Mexico has a monsoon climate. No, really. It’s true that the annual precipitation in my neighborhood is 16 inches a year, which is not precisely the torrential rainfall one often associates with a monsoon; but the climate pattern is a monsoon climate pattern. We get most of our rain...Read more